Wind electric bio-fuel plugin hybrid

[iieo]

Since I am in a high windspeed area and intend to build a large wind machine for all my power needs, I am wondering if anyone here would be interested in extending the home power generation topics here into the area of charging up electric hybrid plugin vehicles and using wind power to refine bio fuels.  

The topic of a bio fuel powered generator to recharge batteries in a hybrid electric vehicle may also fit in here.  That 1930's model diesel generator that ran on kerosene or gasoline mentioned at Otherpower is fascinating. If a modernized lighter high RPM version of this could be coupled to a PM alternator, it would make a great multifuel generator for a hybrid vehicle.

What do you think, is it too far out of the message board's main direction?  Actually a hybrid vehicle generator could double as a home back up generator, and so can the batteries in a plugin hybrid.

One more thing, has anyone heard of a home built wind system that uses a car differential to bring power down the tower with a shaft to the ground to directly power heat pumps, water pumps, air compressors, and alternators from a flywheel system?

It seems to me that the idea of storing heat in cement slabs, water from a well in storage tanks, cold in a refridgerator may be the best solution to energy storage problems involving batteries.  Do the energy intensive jobs like water pumping, heating/cooling,and of course battery charging when the wind is blowing, when it's blowing too hard slow the wind machine by kicking in the heat pump or water pump.

Save the battery power for lighting and electronics.  

Thanks for the excellent site, have already bought some books.  Hope to contribute real practical information as so many here do already.  Very good.

[mkseps]

I believe the 1930s diesel engine you reference was not a diesel engine at all.  Many farm tractors of the day used these combo engines for economy.  Kerosine was a few cents cheaper than gasoline.  Engines running on kerosine exhibited lower horsepowers.  These were standard gasoline engines with compression ratios about 6:1.  The exhaust manifolds had an adjustable baffle to direct the hot gases towards the intake manifold making the engine run hotter.  The operator would start the engine on gasoline and once warmed up would switch the fuel line to the kerosine supply.  The operator would be much advised to switch it back to gasoline about 5 minutes before shutting the engine off if he expected to get it started at a later time.  The engine could not start on kerosine.

Gene

[jacquesm]

The amount of energy required to move a vehicle is pretty impressive, there was a good thread on here a while ago on the required power, and iirc the lower bound of the practical was 30KW or so.

The upshot of that is that if you want to move your car with windpower, taking into account all the conversion losses and such you'd better plan your trips very carefully because you won't be making many of them, unless you install 100KW or so of windpoower.

This is very much off the cuff, and by no means meant to discourage you, in fact I'd really like to see someone pull this off. I would very much like to have a setup myself but I can not see the cost justification at current gas prices:

Windpower costs roughly $3/Watt to install commercially and rougly $.3/Watt to 'homebrew' (small machine including tower, wiring & control circuitry), but 100KW homebrew turbines are not too thick on the ground and the cost/watt would probably go up quite a bit once you reach that power level. (though the 'Tvind' project in Danmark actually did better than that). You could of course install an array of multiple small machines.

[ghurd]

I often wondered why a little hybred couldn't be built like that.

Makes sense to me. That little Honda works.

I almost tried it with a VW beetle, lawn mower engine+alternator, and tow motor parts, but then rust ate the car. I shouldn't have put it off for 10 years.

Charge the batteries with wind/sun when you can. It would get you to and from a beer run easy enough.

For longer trips.

I thought a 10HP diesel in the trunk running full tilt to an alternator, when you are driving, to charge the batteries as you go. Get to the grocery store with half dead batteries? Just let the diesel keep running when you are shopping. It would take less batteries, reducing the over all weight, increasing the 'mile per weight' (Wow! i just invented a new rating, I think), but decreasing the 'battery only' distance.

It wouldn't leave you stuck 20 miles from home. When the batteries get almost dead, stop for coffee. And leave the motor run to charge up the batteries enough to get home. It would charge enough to get home before a tow truck would get there (at least tow trucks around here).

When you get home with almost dead batteries, shut off the diesel, plug it into the windmill.

It makes more sense to me than a fully electric car that only goes X miles at low speed, and 1/2X miles at high speed. I wouldn't want to be doing math in my head as I drive to figure out if I must turn around RIGHT NOW to get home.

I didn't do any math, as I have no experience with electric cars. Just seems kind of a common sense.

Anybody find anything wrong in my thinking? Why wouldn't this be a good idea?

[thunderhead]

The thing that's wrong with your thinking, I'm afraid, is the energy requrements of a car.  My Fiesta-based Quantum Coupe (my EV project car) goes between 4 and 6 miles(depending on speed) per kWh of mechanical energy.  My (ebay surplus) batteries will store about 18kWh which will therefore give me a theoretical maximum range of 108 miles, or with battery (Peukert) and motor losses taken into account, nearer 50-60 miles.

Yes, I want a supplementary generator, but probably only 7.5kVa or so: just enough to punt along at 40mph to get home.  I'm considering towing it until I can work the bugs out of the fuel metering.  A 25kVA 3-phase generator would be nice, to give me motorway speeds all day, but that's a later project, I think.  But if you think about how such a beast would fit into a domestic power system, you can see where the problem lies with running your EV off your off-grid power system.

To charge up an 18kWh battery using a 1kW windmill takes 18 hours of wind.  A 1kW windmill is not a little beast, either.  If you get six hours of sunshine where you live (about what we get in July) then your PV panel alternative needs to deliver 3kW of power - at 100w per square yard, you won't fit that on the car, or even the garage roof.

If my invertors are 90% efficient, a homebrew electricity storage system would need to store 20kWh to charge my car for my daily commute.  The normal "rule of thumb" around here seems to be 5 days storage, so you're adding an extra 100kWh to the battery bank to survive this - and nearly an additional 1kW of generation capacity to provide this energy.  If you're on 12v, that's over 8000Ah.  If you're on 60v (my plan) it's still over 1500Ah.  That's a lot of battery.  I doubt anyone here has a storage battery for home power of 100kWh storage - and there are some pretty serious systems owned by the regulars here.

I have done the maths on electric cars (which need not be slow) and a homepower system to charge an electric car is a very big beast.  I'm planning to charge my electric car project off the grid.  Fortunately for me, living in the country I do, I can buy windpower right off the grid.

[thunderhead]

If you are making a heat store I'd guess the best material to use is water, which stores five times the heat of concrete per unit temperature rise.  Heating your water to boiling point is going to store as much heat as heating the same weight of concrete to over 400C.

Water is also cheap. :-)

[iieo]

Yep water is a great heat storage medium, I prefer a lap pool for that, great exersize also.  But the ultimate storage media are the soluble salt solutions, huge capacity and you can get temps that are right in the best zones as far as home and hot water heating.

As far as the huge amounts of power needed for electric vehicles, that is why a shaft to the base of the tower into a flywheel is a great solution.  40 foot blades would provide enough power in my average windspeed area, but how to mount the huge alternator needed to use that much peak power?

A massive flywheel at the base would prevent overspeed on the blades, and a PM alternator could be constructed right on the flywheel, with the magnets mounted on the flywheel rim, then different coils of finer up to very thick wire that kick in and out of the rotating magnetic field depending on flywheel speed.

Also a heat pump, water pump to supply water for heat extraction to the heat pump system,heat pump to cool a freezer and refridgerator, and water pump to store water for domestic needs can be powered by belt drive off of the flywheel.  With electric clutches that kick in and out depending upon need and the power available from the wind at the time.

I am assuming an EV range of 50 miles is sufficient, on longer trips one would fire up the bio-diesel powered alternator for the whole trip.  Then shut it down if returning home or to a place where a recharge can be plugged into, 50 miles or so before arriving at that recharge destination.  Miles per gallon of 60 or so should still be possible if the continuous driving is limited to about 300 miles between charging from a stationary source.

The whole shaft drive to the base of the tower system is what I'm not finding any data or experimental information about.  

The other thing that would fill in the gaps in the design are experiments with high capacity diesel alternators that are light enough to fit in a car.  I am assuming a turbocharged diesel engine coupled with a motorcycle type belt drive to a very high rpm PM alternator might do the trick.  Maybe one with liquid cooling for the high current coils needed to provide enough peak power to double the electrical power available from the batteries supplied to the electric motor for climbing hills, operating with low batteries, or quick acceleration?

[troy]

A secondary generator for an electric car is a possibility, but it would pretty much have to be a purpose built machine just for that.  And that would be a completely different animal than the generator you'd want to use at your house.  Here's why they are such different machines:

To make the car go, you need vast quantities of highly motivated electrons.  But weight is a big penalty so you need an generator with an internal combustion engine that runs at fairly high rpm to get enough watts to drive your car at a decent rate down the highway.  I have seen photos of a nicely engineered trailer with a motorcycle engine driving an efficient generator to do just that.  The whole outfit was under 300 pounds.

But a high speed light weight generator, although it has terrific output per pound (which we want for the car) would be terrible around the house.  Noisy, overpowered and short life span.  For the perfect generator around a house, you want something that operates at low rpm, because that is far quieter and far more durable.  That means heavy.  The perfect example is my six horsepower Lister diesel genset.  Mean time between major overhauls is supposed to be 50-100,000 hours.  But it weighs almost 1000 pounds with frame and gennie, etc.  And it wouldn't put out enough power (3000 watts steady state max) to do much of anything for your car.

Doing a hybrid car well is an exquisite balancing act.

Good luck and have fun!

troy

[ghurd]

I was more thinking of the generator to slow how fast the batteries went dead, not really powerfull enough to move the car.

Either way. My poor Beetle would never have supported the batteries. I guess I saved some time and money by putting it off.

[elvin1949]

chech out the mother earth news

home built hybred

have 2 that i know of

one small gas [ 45 mph on the genny only

much faster with batteries full auto start on genny when batteries low. 75 mpg on gas on long trip ]

second one by same person 4 wheel drive truck

deisal[spelling] done by same man

later

elvin